Adjuncts: a dirty word?

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. Opening a brewpub takes a lot of time, and the infant and young child at home take up whatever might be left. As the summer season winds down in Saratoga, I’ll try to post with some regularity. Take that as a warning: if you don’t want to catch sight of my drivel, skip past the TU blog page.

As I sip a Belgian-style Wit beer that I brewed at my new brewpub, Druthers, I realized that a short bit about adjuncts would be appropriate. A simple, accurate definition of adjunct is anything that provides food for the yeast (aka, fermentable material) that isn’t derived from malt. Examples of adjuncts include any kind of sugar that is directly consumable by brewer’s yeast, like honey or maple syrup. Starchy substances like rice, corn or any unmalted (raw) grain can also be used, provided they are mashed with malt so that their starches are converted to sugar.

Adjuncts are used instead of a portion of malt in a beer recipe. This has the effect of maintaining the beer’s alcohol strength while reducing malt’s flavor and color contribution. Many of the world’s best-selling beers use rice and corn to do just that; Budweiser and Coors are not low-alcohol beers, but they taste extremely light in flavor and are very pale yellow because of the large amount of adjunct used in place of malt.

Early in America’s craft beer revolution there were brewers who eschewed the use of adjuncts because the world’s biggest breweries abused them to lighten beer’s character and lower production cost (adjuncts are cheap, malt is expensive). Craft beer is all about flavor, so why would you want to do anything to dilute it? I can recall early Sam Adams ads in which Jim Koch proclaimed that his was the only American beer that could be sold in Germany because it was adjunct-free (the German Purity law of 1516, the Reinheitsgebot, makes the use of adjuncts illegal).

After a short while, America’s craft brewers realized that to capture the character of some of the world’s great beer styles, adjuncts are necessary. Many Belgian-style beers depend on adjuncts to develop their expected flavors. The aforementioned Wit needs raw wheat to maintain light, refreshing flavor and allow the spices to take center stage. Triple needs light candy sugar to build alcoholic strength while remaining relatively light and darker strong ales require dark candy sugars that impart a caramel flavor to the beer.

There’s no way around it: adjuncts are necessary to achieve certain flavor effects. How is it that industrial brewers came to use them to eliminate flavor?

Brewers have long used adjuncts, often to lower production costs; that’s part of why the Reinheitsgebot came into being. In 19th century America, starchy adjuncts were used by German immigrant brewers not to cheapen beer, but to dilute the high protein levels of the barley malt produced here. Too much protein leads to unstable beer because brewers’ yeast can’t eat it all. The leftovers become food for unwanted microbes that can spoil a beer’s flavor.

A style of beer now called Pre-Prohibition Pilsner is a great example of a flavorful American style that uses adjuncts to dilute protein content to promote stability. A lager brewed by immigrant Germans in the mid 19th century, it was 5-8% Alcohol By Volume (ABV) and highly hopped. This was a relatively flavorful beer made from high-protein 6-row barley malt and up to 25% corn. It made corn a common American beer ingredient.

Prohibition destroyed not only America’s brewing industry but also its brewing heritage. This bold, hoppy pilsner was lost to history until revived by homebrewers in the 1990s. Even after Prohibition was declared a failure, there remained stubborn remnants of the temperance movement. It was in part to win over more drinkers that breweries began to use adjuncts to lighten the character of beer. Taken to an extreme, we today see very bland beers with labels like “Ultra” and “Light.”

I subscribe to the philosophy that if I’m going to bring alcohol into my body, it’s got to be damn good and characterful. I’m not going to waste liver cells on light-tasting beers, so I don’t make beers that use adjuncts to that end. I do use adjuncts in some of my beers, but only to enhance character. Raisins can help a barley wine taste a bit older than it really is and some unrefined cane sugar can help dry out the finish of an ESB. I don’t like using rice or corn because they really add nothing to a beer’s character, although my Pre-Prohibition Pilsner did win first place at a homebrew contest back in the late 90’s. I’ll try anything once.

If I’m trying to make a full-bodied beer I don’t usually use any adjuncts. Malt = body. Some darker beers aren’t meant to be all that thick, such as a Belgian-style Dubble or even a Quad. In those cases, dark candi syrup works well to add burnt sugar and caramel flavor without adding body. Molasses can be used to similar effect.

It’s a case of one word’s meaning becoming too narrowly defined. In craft beer circles “adjuncts” is indeed a dirty word since the immediate association is the use of corn and rice in fizzy yellow lagers and malt liquors. Yet everyone forgets, as you pointed out, that things like honey and Belgian candi sugar are technically adjuncts.

I think as American craft beer continues to re-define the global beer scene the Germans will eventually have to re-write or drop the 1516 Purity Law. They are missing out on so many styles by banning “adjuncts”.

The Reinheitsgebot was already repealed back in the early days of the EU; it was declared to be protectionist because most of the beers made by other EU countries couldn’t pass muster. German brewers have since honored the purity law but some upstarts have expanded their ingredient lists to make fun new beers.

Actually, the Bavarian Reinheitsgabot of 1516 was instituted so that people would stop making beer out of grain that was better for baking. The Bavarians were the only ones who actually adhered to the law (even though Wheat beers were produced in Bavaria by the 17th century) The law was extended to all of Germany in 1906, as condition of Bavaria before joining the German unification. Bavaria saw it as way to protect one of the regions largest industries. The breweries of Northern Germany were so pleased about this. So, the Reinheitsgabot was, historically, more about politics than that of purity of beer.

Adjuncts do dilute protein content however, immigrant lager brewers who came to the US also used corn because of it’s availability, especially as the country expanded west in the late 19th century. Corn is easier to grow than barley and, even in the 19th century, the US had tons of the stuff. It is also cheaper because it doesn’t to need to be malted, so why not use it? Plus, American law never prohibited it’s use.

Bushwick Pilsners—those made in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, NY—were corn (and sometimes rice) adjunct beers, heavily hopped with Cluster (although sometimes noble hops were also used). Noticeably dry and quite hoppy, these beers—such as Schaefer and Liebman’s Rhinegold Extra Dry—thrived into the 1960s, well after prohibition. Consolidation of breweries and/or changes to recipes to compete with larger brewing operations in the 1970s, as well as taxation and other localized issues, is what killed the so-called “pre-prohibiton” lager—not just in New York, but across the country.

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